Besides the Boston Red Sox, the Fenway Sports Group holds a half-share of a Nascar racing team (Jack Roush's), a British soccer outfit (Liverpool FC), and a marketing relationship with LeBron James.

With Liverpool and AS Roma set to play a preseason friendly at Fenway next week, Bloomberg Businessweek has a good read in an interview with Boston Red Sox co-owner Tom Werner on Fenway Sports Group's global strategy.

Fun fact: Of the 20 teams in the English Premier League, the elite British soccer organization of which Liverpool is a member, five are owned by American entities – including Manchester United, the team rated the world's most valuable, owned by the Glazer family of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

As Werner pointed out, European soccer doesn't have the salary caps, revenue sharing and other moneymaking restrictions maintained in baseball. “In baseball, when you acquire a franchise, you are one-thirtieth of an industry,” he told Bloomberg. “If we sell a Liverpool jersey to a supporter in Jakarta, we keep 100 percent of that.”

Liverpool's biggest matches also draw 500 million viewers, a fact I pointed out in a recent blog post questioning why soccer at Fenway Park makes sense for a company that risks alienating two large, loyal fan bases.